Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday May 06, 2011 @11:24AM
from the some-syfy-exec-just-found-his-next-awful-movie dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Computer networks that can't forget fast enough can show symptoms of of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers new clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, say researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Yale University. In their experiments, the scientists used a virtual neural network to simulate an excessive release of dopamine in the brain and found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion. The results bolster a hypothesis known in schizophrenia circles as the hyperlearning hypothesis, which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would. Without forgetting, they lose the ability to extract what's meaningful out of the immensity of stimuli the brain encounters."

This is not a positive trait or a gift. It's a brain disease, and brain diseases produce lots of suffering at the deepest possible level. As someone who knows people with brain diseases I can tell you that "hyperlearning", in the same sense of "hyperlexia" do not qualify as gifts, even though they might seem to because they have the prefix 'hyper-' in them. The brain's ability to detect the salience of certain information, while throwing out other, less salient information, is central to its ability to function and perform basic tasks in the world. Without these abilities self-sufficiency and quality of life diminish precipitously.

I've never understood how schizophrenia got equated with having multiple personalities. I've known many schizophrenics because schizophrenia runs in my family and not a single one of them has multiple personalities.